


Mutants and Mutants: Illyan's Team

by Ecarden



Series: Mutants and Mutants [4]
Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold, X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Thinking, Tiresome Introductions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-13 04:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29645445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ecarden/pseuds/Ecarden
Summary: A team of spies set to watch him. They think they're playing for his technology. He thinks he's not-at-all-playing for their loyalty. Both can be right. Both can even win. But will they?
Series: Mutants and Mutants [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2172486
Comments: 8
Kudos: 26





	1. Preparation

**Author's Note:**

> Meant this to be another one chapter bit, but then Illyan decided to explain what he was thinking. He has so many thoughts. Tiresome.

They were a collection of warring groups. He’d been fairly sure before they finally assigned him a team, but the team’s makeup confirmed it. One from each of the big three powers and a fourth from the Director’s office. The fact that it had taken several weeks for them to sort out who they were assigning, said nothing good about their bureaucracy either.

On the other hand, they had let him out of the cell after only another few hours and well before he was forced to ask for water, or his bladder burst. They set him up with quarters on the base and gave him a vast amount of ‘orientation materials’ clearly intended to distract and delay him. Along with limited comm console access (though he did end up having to skim through the manual then refer to it repeatedly due to archaic design decisions) his initial information problems were gone.

To be replaced by the new and more familiar problem of too much information. Still, the chip’s search functions were quite good. In fact, he was vaguely horrified to discover that his search of their regulations was not inadequate. They actually did not require any oath of MRD agents. The Director and a few of their senior people made oaths (to organizations, not people) but the rank-and-file did not.

Now this was not a society like Beta Colony where an oath was just a pretty, archaic thing which they might gawp at like it was a tourist attraction. He easily found the oaths of the militaries which made up the bulk of the recruiting pool. Pretty symbolism, not binding the way a Barrayaran oath would be. But to ignore it was to ignore the fact that symbols _mattered_. He was beginning to see why the MRD had been so easy to distract and defeat in detail. They trained separately, spoke different languages, ate separately (as he had cause to see in the commissary) and had nothing except their hatred of mutation to bind them together.

It took more than that to build an organization. He was honestly considering escape and reuniting with the X-Men on the theory that he had overestimated this threat, when he finally got around to looking into the question that had been bothering him since his first discussion with Diana. What did they do with the captured? If they were simply being killed, why bother with capture?

It was both better and worse than he’d feared. For his region, there were three facilities run by the MRD. Mutant criminals (for simply being a mutant wasn’t, quite, a crime most places) were tried locally, then sentenced to one of the three prisons. Each had a long alpha-numeric designation, but they were far better known by their informal names. The Funhouse, the Icebox and the Kiln.

The Funhouse was where the mutants who’d used their powers to commit fairly minor crimes (or criminals who’d turned out upon testing to be mutants) were sent. It was the closest to a standard prison and was a propaganda piece for the MRD. Regular visitors and inspections. Not a nice place, but not too much worse than a standard medium-security prison.

The Icebox was where mutants with powers too dangerous to be allowed to remain awake, or mutants who couldn’t control their powers were sent. They were either sedated, or cryo-preserved, depending on their nature. He’d almost given up on his historical resources for tech advances at this point. They definitely shouldn’t have had cryo tech at this point, but they did. Probably. It was also possible that there was a big pile of frozen corpses in the Icebox and the MRD was just lying about it to convince the desperate to surrender and motivate people to fund their research into a ‘cure.’ 

The third was the nightmare and probably where he would find what he needed. The Kiln was the maximum security facility for mutants who’d committed serious crimes and who could be contained without resorting to drugs or cryo. No visitors. No outside inspections. Turnover for guards was _very_ high. Turnover for prisoners was even higher, but entirely out into the crematorium that was on site. According to the records he'd found, no one sentenced to the Kiln had _ever_ made it through their sentence to be released. Though some had escaped, usually aided by the X-Men, or Brotherhood.

For all their challenges, the MRD was capturing a shocking number of mutants. A shocking and _rising_ number. That didn’t make much sense. They were taking mutants out of the breeding population at an astounding rate. Despite the lack of any inherent crime in being a mutant, more than 90% of the ones he could identify eventually ended up in prison, a grave, or a wanted list. But the numbers kept rising. Unless there was some sort of environmental factor causing the mutations, or a truly _massive_ number of undetected ones, that shouldn’t be how it worked.

He put that to one side, as he lacked the medical expertise to have a final position. However, over the years he had reviewed a wide range of medical technologies. Sometimes looking for hidden Cetegandan nonsense. Sometimes looking for something to make up for his failure to protect Miles all those years ago. One technology he was intimately familiar with due to its widespread use on Barrayar and throughout the Nexus was gene-cleaning. Generally it required the use of a uterine replicator, however. Though he was also familiar with that technology, he was in no way familiar with the intervening steps between wherever this reality was in its technological advancement and modern technology. And that was without considering how very little he could predict what releasing any tech would do. Until he had better control over the situation, he couldn't risk it.

With that settled for the moment, he checked the numbers. They were right. He’d also been right that the US, Russia, China and, oddly, Canada, were all missing a significant number of mutants. Cause wasn’t clear.

As his mind raced, he kept his face stony and carefully built a routine that kept the agents watching him thoroughly bored. Exercise. Review files. Target practice (with their weapons, not his). Review more files. Lunch. Review _more_ files. Clean his uniform. Check his weapons. Review _more_ files. Dinner. Sleep.

Their security systems were reasonable, but nothing the anti-surveillance equipment on his belt couldn’t have overcome. He held that in reserve, however and continued his routine. The one thing he did change was replacing the _damn_ riding boots of his formal dress uniform with more standard boots. They were happy to provide that to him easily enough, though he made little other progress with his watchers. He wished he had Miles’s gift for charm, but in its absence he would simply have to get by with his own gifts.

They finally provided him with files on ‘his’ team.

Viktor Kolesnikov. Mary Anderson. Zheng Luo. Alexander McNair.

Each was a fully qualified agent, but had their own special skills as well.

Sniper. Scout. Heavy Weapons. Tech/Medic.

A good breakdown for a military strike team expected to operate independently.

Total shit for police.

No negotiator. No search and rescue. No crowd control. No _investigators_.

Illyan was sympathetic to the difficulties of trying to bridge the police and military roles. ImpSec had to do so all too often. But doing so by simply abandoning one was a recipe for messy failure. Or massacre.

The files he was provided were heavy on credentials and brief summaries of past missions and entirely light on the sort of details that might allow him to figure out how to use them for anything except killing mutants. Whether that was deliberate, or another example of MRD incompetence was difficult to say. Still, his plan required them to pull together when attacked by the rest of the MRD, rather than fracture.

So, step one was build some sort of team out of these individuals. Competition was always good for that. Team exercises, against a skilled opponent…

Fortunately, the MRD had kindly given him an almost endless supply of other agents who were meant to be keeping an eye on him.

But before he could deploy them, he had to meet them. Tiresome.


	2. Introduction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meeting the subordinates set to spy on you is always an interesting experience. But the important thing is to make it clear who's in control. 
> 
> Illyan. Illyan is in control.

He met them, appropriately enough, in a meeting room. They were sitting around the table when he entered, but snapped to their feet and came to attention. Illyan’s eyes flicked over the group and his mind saw a thousand briefings before thousands of his agents. But these weren’t _his_ agents, yet.

Letting his eyes wander over the group while they remained braced, he examined what he had read about each.

Viktor Kolesnikov. Russian. Sniper. 34 years old. With the MRD for two years. Formerly Russian Spetsnaz. Made a shot from over two thousand yards to kill a Brotherhood member, without touching the hostage she was hiding behind. Allegedly. The shot was well documented. The evidence that the woman was a Brotherhood member rather less so. Even less documented was his last mission for Russia. Where he apparently went native and joined the cult he’d been sent to investigate. He hadn’t broken free until the cult leader was dead and had spent a year in a Russian military prison until it was established that the cult leader had been a mutant with mind control abilities. An interesting choice. Despite his nation failing him, his presence here meant that he either blamed mutants for that failure, or had convinced his superiors that he had. There was no hint to be found in a blandly warm face. Most snipers Illyan had known were lean, but Viktor was clearly a bodybuilder, with truly ridiculously large arms.

He might want revenge, but there was no way to get it. The man who’d hurt him was dead. A problem for anyone seeking to manipulate him in that fashion.

Mary Anderson. American. Scout. 29 years old. With the MRD for nine years. Last four assignments were from the Director personally. The only one of the group without significant external military experience. Somehow snuck up on an empath, cut his throat and planted the explosives to take out the entire group without anyone else noticing. Joined the MRD after she was the sole survivor of an attack by the ridiculously overpowered mutant En Sabah Nur (known as Apocalypse, a name Illyan had found difficult to take seriously until he got some video of the man in action) on her sorority. Rumor (for people underestimate his hearing, especially with enhancement from the chip) reports that Apocalypse offered to make her a mutant if she would serve him and she refused. This seems improbably given his past actions towards any form of weakness, but not impossible, given his tendency to attempt to create enemies to challenge him. The MRD loyalist on the team was short, small and very lean. She kept her face still as stone as Illyan regarded her. He saw four hidden weapons. She saw him seeing them and didn’t flinch.

She did want revenge. But based on everything Illyan had read about Apocalypse, killing him was almost certainly impossible and containing him was likely to be incredibly difficult.

Zheng Luo. Chinese. Heavy Weapons Expert. 40 years old. The oldest on the team, except Illyan himself. No files from before he volunteered to join the MRD three years ago were available. Since then, he’d performed extremely well, both with standard heavy weapons and explosives. Why he joined the MRD was entirely unclear. From a brute force comparison of timing, it did occur shortly after most of a People’s Liberation Army battalion was destroyed in a confrontation with Magneto. A nasty scar down the left side of his face gave him a permanent sneer and made it hard to read his expression.

Magneto was a problem, but one outside his reach at the moment.

Alexander McNair. American. Tech/Medic. 37 years old. Did a tour in the U.S. Army, then went to college on the G.I. Bill. Went to work at a hospital as technical support. The mutant known as “Contagion” (real name unknown) came in after he was hit by a car. As the name suggests, disease followed quickly. Of more than a thousand people in the hospital, McNair was one of twenty-three survivors. He’s also the one who cut Contagion’s throat. He also cut the throat of ninety-eight other people trying to find the one responsible. He should have been in jail, but instead he ended up in the MRD. His classically handsome features showed no sign of the man underneath. His hair and nails were immaculate. Nothing revealed any instability, but there was something off in him.

He wanted forgiveness, but wouldn’t accept it from Illyan, not yet.

After a moment of examination, Illyan nodded to them and waved them back into their seats. “You obviously know who I am. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know who you are. Do you know each other?” he asked, taking up the casual parade rest he could maintain indefinitely.

They glanced around the table without any particular warmth. They were clearly trying to figure out who was going to answer the question. Illyan just waited.

After a long moment of glaring at one another, Mary spoke up. As the representative from the Director’s office, she was sort of outside the national competitions. Though Viktor and Luo glared at her anyway. “By reputation, mostly. I’ve worked with each of them once.”

“Viktor?” Illyan asked.

“No one besides Mary,” he answered in Russian.

“Luo?”

“Mary and McNair,” he said. He tried Mandarin first, but Illyan didn’t speak it, so he repeated himself in slightly accented English.

“Alexander?”

“Just Mary and Zheng.” Illyan noticed that they all used Mary’s first name, but Luo had used Alexander’s last name and Alexander had used Luo’s. Personal dislike between the two of them? Or disrespect for the only woman on the team? Either was possible. Neither was solvable without more information.

“Suboptimal. Draw training equipment and meet me in training yard 2 in twenty minutes.”

“Why?” Alexander asked.

“Because he said so,” Mary snapped.

“Thank you, Mary. But so long as my orders are obeyed, I’m happy to explain in order to ensure we all understand. Alexander, you are drawing training weapons and reporting to training grounds in order to engage in training,” his voice was dead level.

“We all know our jobs,” Alexander pushed.

“Perhaps my phrasing caused some confusion, Alexander. Draw training equipment and meet me in training yard 2 in twenty minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are there any questions before I dismiss you?” he asked as they started to move towards the door. They stopped.

“Sir, why are we engaging in training? We are all fully qualified agents,” Mary asked after another round of glanced.

“Individual skill in insufficient to ensure victory. Teamwork and unity are required. We will learn to work together.”

“Experience is the best trainer,” Viktor suggested.

“Training is the best method of ensuring you survive to gain experience.”

“We have all survived this far,” Alexander snapped. Illyan, considered the man. Either he was trying something subtle, or he was even more unstable than expected.

“Are you familiar with the term survivorship bias?” Illyan asked.

The man blinked at him. Given his training, he absolutely had to be familiar with the term. “The logical error of only considering those who have passed some test, or survived some trial.”

“Survival does not prove competence. It merely proves survival. Individual competence does not prove team competence. So, let’s go prove ourselves, shall we?” Illyan asked.

The team did not mutiny. Luo even nodded his agreement, though that might well be an attempt at ingratiation. He hadn’t convinced them, but he didn’t have to. Being in command had some perks.

“Dismissed.”

Illyan himself gathered up the earpieces he needed and took up position near the yard. His observers had agreed to provide opposition forces. They hadn’t wanted to. But when given the choice of that, or continuing to watch him engage in the world’s dullest routine, they took the opportunity that didn’t end with them dead of boredom. The team would be _heavily_ outnumbered and Illyan would not be assisting them directly. The field was set up for capture the flag. Lots of cover and an elevated position at each end. Snipers aplenty. Illyan would be the last line of defense for their flag and in a perfect position to call the plays that they would make.

An unsubtle attempt to instill himself as knowledgeable and following his orders as the correct course of action. They would be on guard for that, which was fine, since the real goal was to get them to work as a group and to see their fellow MRD agents as the enemy.

The next week was going to be long and painful as the training weapons stung quite a bit when they hit. And they would be hit. A lot. They were individually skilled, but Illyan had quite deliberately stacked the deck against them and himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments are always welcome.


	3. Failure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Practice makes perfect.

“Alexander, cover left.”

The American moved instantly and appropriately, a spray of paint took down the lead agent coming from that direction, but he turned back to look down the corridor and the second woman in the assault team took him down.

Luo, who had been watching the front the entire time tried to recover, but down a man they had no chance at all.

* * *

“You didn’t trust your teammate to watch their assigned angle.”

* * *

Mary tripped. The others pulled away from the noise that attracted their hunters. Illyan hadn’t expected that. By the time he ordered them back, it was too late. She was gone. Down a woman, they had no chance at all.

* * *

“You abandoned a teammate.”

* * *

Viktor fired again. He’d already taken his shot. He should have relocated, but there was another target available. He took it. The paint grenade painted the entire area red. Mary moved away, slipping the net of approaching agents, but down a man they had no chance at all.

* * *

“You prioritized your individual victory over the victory of the team.”

* * *

Luo flicked a flash-bang directly into Alexander’s line of advance by mistake. The American dove back towards cover belatedly, but crashed into it instead due to blindness. He was picked off easily. Down a man, they had no chance at all.

* * *

“You failed to maintain awareness of the rest of your team.”

* * *

On the third day of unrelenting failure, they all sat together in the commissary instead of separating. Not with Illyan, but they did sit together. He could listen in, by replaying the audio through his chip. They were engaging in the most time-honored practice of lower ranking soldiers.

Complaining about the stupidity of their superiors.

He didn’t smile, but it was a step in the right direction.

* * *

They walked right into an ambush and were massacred without a chance to fight back.

* * *

“I missed the signs and walked you into a trap.”

They stared at him in shock. After five days of hearing about their own, many, many, failings this was the first time it had been his fault.

“Now, let’s try shifting strategy somewhat, shall we?” he asked with a cool smile.

“Sir?” Mary finally asked.

“I think we have them convinced that we’re sticking with group assaults until the four of you manage to break through fifteen or twenty people. Now it’s time to shift strategy. Mary, you will infiltrate their keep and retrieve their flag. Luo and Alexander, you will act as our decoy assault team. Don’t push, just keep probing and falling back. Viktor, you’re taking my position in the tower, I’ve booby-trapped it quite thoroughly, but when they realize they can get all of us, they may actually try to capture our flag. I’ll make sure any such efforts fail. Questions?”

So far their opposition had made one run on the flag, ran into a paint-mine and noticed that Illyan apparently used his entire set of traps from each run boobytrapping the tower and didn’t bother to remove them after each defeat. It was honestly a little difficult to move around in there. So they relied on snipers to keep him suppressed.

“This whole thing was a setup to get them to relax their guard?” Viktor asked.

“Not at all. It also had numerous other benefits as well. You are working together better and are listening better.”

“Not well enough,” Luo snapped. He was not taking constant defeat particularly well.

“On the contrary, Luo. You’ve gone almost as far as raw force can without some form of force-multiplier which the rules of the training deny us. We could break those rules, either their spirit, or their letter, but that is unnecessary when we can achieve victory other ways. So, let’s try introducing some more sophisticated tactics and see how our opponents respond.”

“Excellent!” Alexander said, rising to his feet and pounding a fist on the table. “We’ve got ‘em now.”

“It seems likely, now, let’s go over positioning,” Illyan pulled out a hand-drawn map of the battlefield. “Based on the last forty variations of cover placement, this is the one which will be up next. Enemy snipers will most likely be here and here,” he tapped two points. “They’re likely to gather in three squads which will cover the main approaches. You,” he looked at Luo and Alexander, “need to pull this squad out of alignment here, so that Mary can get past. Attacks from this corridor and then withdraw, which should open them up here,” he tapped the map again. At this point everyone was gathered around it with none of their previous tension at being around one another. “You may have to keep hitting them to pull them far enough out of position, but with snipers suppressed, we should be able to keep the other teams from flanking you.”

“How do you know this?” Viktor asked.

“It’s what they’ve done for five days, with slight variations as they’ve slowly improved their defensive deployments. I do have a somewhat better view than you, even if I have to stay out of the snipers’ line of sight. Any questions?”

“Do you really think this will work?” Viktor asked.

“There’s a reasonable chance. If not, we will adjust our strategy and try again. If we can’t outsmart a bunch of security guards, then we’ll be in real trouble in the field,” Illyan’s tone was derisive, though actually the MRD agents assigned to watch him were doing a perfectly reasonable job with a moderate degree of professionalism. There was no particular reason to bear them any malice, but for some reason the folks they’d been shooting for the last five days probably didn’t see it that way. Which made it an excellent tool in his ongoing campaign to alienate them from the MRD.

That pulled them in good and proper. Saying they were better than folks who had beaten them was always a popular message. Saying they were only beaten because they were outnumbered didn’t hurt either. It also distracted from the facts that he’d set it up that way.

He had them. Not all the way, but the first step.

Once they won, he’d have taken another step. After that though, it would require actual work to proceed. Otherwise, he’d eventually lose his grip on them. Until then he’d have to keep coming up with ways for them to win.

* * *

They won.

They celebrated for the rest of the day.

He put in to have them transferred to active duty, with paperwork perfectly filled out the moment the match was over.

It still took four days for them to be on their way to Seattle to assist the regional team there.

The last two days were prep.

So he only had to give them one more absurd victory.

He cheated.

After their previous defeat, the guards were prepared for tactics within the practice yard. They were not prepared to have several of their number mildly poisoned by Mary; or three ‘accidentally’ locked in a hallway by Alexander; or two so hungover after a night drinking with Viktor that they couldn’t walk; or for Luo to straight up order four of them to other duties temporarily. With that done, they were left with even numbers, which Illyan’s team could handle and did.

It wasn’t the most subtle of solutions and it annoyed a lot of people, but it did well at putting the MRD on one side and his people on the other.

**Author's Note:**

> One of the few pieces of X-Men lore I do know is that the Weapon X project (which gives Wolverine his metal claws/bones) is located in Canada and was the country's effort to create a super-soldier program. 
> 
> Comments always welcome!


End file.
